WMC Women Under Siege
The cookstove-rape prevention myth and the problem with simple solutions
Indoor air pollution might not be a problem for you and me, but it is a deadly issue for roughly 3 billion people in the world. According to the WHO, household air pollution killed 4.3 million people in 2012. That accounts for nearly 8 percent of global deaths that year.
WMC Women Under Siege
Photos: Everyday life in Juárez, one of the most violent cities on earth
The year photographer Itzel Aguilera moved to the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juárez in 2008, it achieved notoriety as the most violent city in the world. Living there with her husband and daughters Valeria, 6, and Dalia, 7 months old, Aguilera, who is 43, was starting to feel unsafe.
WMC Women Under Siege
In Iraq, women ‘are the battlefield’
Yanar Mohammed’s voice is shaky when she picks up the phone. It is noticeable. She apologizes and takes a quick second to compose herself. She has been unnerved by something she just saw on television.
WMC Women Under Siege
August 08, 2014 | Priyali Sur |
Disability,
International,
Violence against women,
WMC Loreen Arbus Journalism Program
Indian government fails acid attack survivors, activists say
In India, the battle for justice is on many fronts for women who survive acid attacks. They continue, in part, because the government has failed to regulate the sales of acid and police have repeatedly failed to even take reports of attacks. So beyond the punishment of specific perpetrators, activists and survivors are fighting to obtain compensation from the government—and rehabilitation.
WMC Women Under Siege
The long and lonely fight: Q&A with Indian tribal rights activist Soni Sori
In a crowded auditorium at a conference on gender-based violence in Delhi this month, a frail woman sits silently. When the discussion shifts to atrocities on tribal women, she takes center stage. When she speaks, the crowd listens in silence. Soni Sori, a schoolteacher, speaks about the fate of women in Chhattisgarh, an Indian state that has been engulfed in violence and conflict.
WMC Women Under Siege
Why soldiers rape — and when they don’t — in diagrams
Men came while she was working in her field. Twice. Like so many women I met a few months ago in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the woman telling her story explained how men wearing uniforms appeared as she worked her land and dragged her to a tree and tied her to it, raping her, cutting her, terrifying her. They wanted her money and they wanted her gone from her field.
WMC Women Under Siege
The smartest way to end rape in war
As a human rights lawyer for more than 40 years, pushing every avenue to advance women’s rights, this month’s Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict hosted by UK Foreign Minister William Hague and Angelina Jolie was a confirming moment of hope.
WMC Women Under Siege
No more music, no more jasmine: A Syrian-American’s reflections on Aleppo
As a young Syrian-American, visiting Aleppo with my family was the highlight of my year. The sweet scent of jasmine abounded in the gardens, mixed with the aroma of Turkish coffee. At night, cafes were always full of people enjoying the cool breeze. But the city’s landscape has drastically changed: Barrel bombs have destroyed entire districts. Missiles have shattered homes, schools, cars, and lives. My family tells me that the pictures in the news do not do justice to the enormity of the devastation. Aleppo has been dubbed “the world’s most dangerous city.”
WMC Women Under Siege
How to seize the huge opportunity created by the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict
“What a fabulous suit. She was perfect, perfect,” said a French woman standing behind me on the escalator. We had just emerged from two hours in a giant auditorium on the outskirts of London where we heard politicians, UN officials, and Nobel Peace Laureate Leymah Gbowee speaking at the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict, billed as the largest gathering ever to focus attention and develop effective solutions to ending rape in war.
WMC Women Under Siege
June 18, 2014 International,
Violence against women
Siege talks to BBC about the UK summit: ‘Listen to the grassroots organizers’
The Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict, which ended on June 13, has now been met with both criticism and praise throughout the media. Our director, Lauren Wolfe, spoke to the BBC’s Radio Scotland from London, where she was a delegate at the summit. She has a mixed take.
WMC Women Under Siege
Ignoring the evidence at the End Sexual Violence in Conflict summit
The Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict ended, for me, not with a bang but with a tiny symbol of my irrelevance. As I stood, furiously tweeting, after the summit’s closing plenary, I was literally pushed aside by a bodyguard to Angelina Jolie. (Special Envoy to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Jolie was a co-host of the summit, with UK Foreign Secretary William Hague.)
WMC Women Under Siege
UK summit on sexualized violence: ‘A time warp in the wrong direction’
I spent the past week in London at the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict hosted by UK Foreign Secretary William Hague and UNHCR Special Envoy Angelina Jolie. It was a historic gathering of ministers and other government representatives, UN officials, the ICRC, and civil society, including our Campaign to Stop Rape & Gender Violence in Conflict.
WMC Women Under Siege
Do we really need Angelina Jolie?
Everyone keeps asking me if we need Angelina Jolie. Leading up to the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict, which Jolie and UK Foreign Secretary William Hague are chairing in London this week, they want to know whether she is useful to this cause. I’ve been thinking a lot about this and have been searching for an answer. And I think I’ve found it.
WMC Women Under Siege
Stigma remains in place as sexualized violence increases in CAR
The Central African Republic may have a new leader for now—Interim President Catherine Samba-Panza was sworn in in January—but there are still old problems that exist when it comes to the country’s long history of sexualized violence.
WMC Women Under Siege
Rape is being used as tool of ethnic violence in South Sudan
In what experts are calling the single worst atrocity since fighting broke out in South Sudan last December, hundreds of men, women, and children were killed last month when rebels seized the northern oil town of Bentiu. The rebels denied the allegations, saying it was retreating government troops who perpetrated the murders. Then, fighters took to radio airwaves—the means by which most South Sudanese citizens access news—and broadcast “hate messages” calling on men to rape women.
WMC Women Under Siege
Abduction of schoolgirls highlights Nigeria’s booming sex trafficking industry
On April 14, nearly 300 Nigerian girls were abducted from their dormitories in a school in the northeastern town of Chibok. But this is hardly the first time Nigerian children have been kidnapped en masse for the purposes of sex—in fact, Nigeria is the birthplace of a sex-trafficking pipeline that leads directly to Italy.
WMC Women Under Siege
Exposing the secret of domestic abuse in Egypt
It wasn’t easy growing up as a teenage Muslim girl, with a father who thought he owned your body just because he put a roof over your head or food on the table. Not just that—this was a Muslim man who perverted the teachings of his own religion to justify the sexual abuse that he inflicted upon me, his own daughter.
WMC Women Under Siege
Siege talks to BBC about why sexualized violence against women is under-reported
With the story of more than 200 schoolgirls kidnapped by an extremist group in Nigeria hot in the news, we spoke to the BBC about why coverage of such violence against women and girls in conflict is so sporadic—and what can be done to make a lasting difference once and for all in the media and in the lives of those affected around the world.
WMC Women Under Siege
The Index: Justice for Rape in War
Year in which General Andrew Jackson is credited with coining the phrase “booty and beauty” to make clear what kind of “spoils…to the victor go”: 1812 ... Year in which an international tribunal established that sexualized violence is a crime against humanity and potentially an act of genocide: 1995 ...
WMC Women Under Siege
A Delhi street where sex workers are forgotten
With painted faces and shiny clothes, almost every day of their lives these women are forced to sell themselves for sex. Their work and lives are at the bottom of everyone’s concern, but they are still tied to Garstin Bastion Road—commonly known as GB Road—Delhi’s biggest red light area, which lies at the center of a busy commercial corner of the capital.
WMC Women Under Siege
‘Everybody knew who testified’: Can disguises work for rape survivors?
A woman sits, microphone in hand, behind a billowing, black curtain—further obscured by a black veil that hides her face, her body, and even her hands—as she finds the courage to recount her rape by government soldiers in Minova, Democratic Republic of Congo.
WMC Women Under Siege
‘The system is designed to make you give up’: An American tackles domestic violence in China
Kim Lee met Li Yang on a trip to China in 1999, when he was lecturing about “Crazy English,” a way of learning the language that involved overcoming inhibitions through shouting slogans such as “Conquer English to Make China Stronger!”
WMC Women Under Siege
Where sisterhood ends: The victim in your own home
When the case of a 23-year-old Indonesian domestic worker made international headlines, readers were shocked to hear of the physical abuse that left the once vibrant young woman nearly disabled. But just as shocking to the international community was the subsequent revelation that her employer—a 40-year-old mother of two—had been charged with the attacks.
WMC Women Under Siege
Mind the digital gender gap: Empowering women online
Women face a variety of barriers to full and equal access, including cost, lack of digital literacy, lack of awareness of the Internet’s potential, and entrenched cultural and gender norms that limit them from forming independent connections outside their home or community. These obstacles are worth overcoming.
WMC Women Under Siege
#SiegePhoto winner: Holding the keys as a reminder of home
We put out a call on social media last month asking you to send us your photos of women in war. In an email by Joanne Mariner, a senior crisis response adviser for Amnesty International, we found a stunning image. Mariner managed to capture the uncertainty of what it means to live in war in this photograph of the hands of a woman holding the keys to her home—now forever a part of her past—in the Central African Republic.